Quick Start Guide
What follows is a building guide for total beginners to give something to hold onto while they learn the ropes. The main goal here is to get a Small Cargo Ship ASAP to start raiding inactive players or undefended planets. It will also give you the option of building a few Rocket Launchers. Suggested build strategy You must first access the Resources tab of the Main Menu to create the resource buildings. Later (from step 27), other buildings can be built from the facilities tab on the main menu and Technologies can be researched from the Research tab. Timings are provided at each step: the time to build this step, the time to mine the resources for the next step, and the total time since the start before the next step can be begun (the total times were all calculated using the other times in the table, and afterwards rounded off to the nearest 5 or so minutes for display purposes). :*Varies depending on proximity to sun. This is because the farther away you are the more Deuterium is produced (i.e. if you are closer it may take longer). Conversely, the closer you are the more Energy is produced. Now build a small cargo ship. This building order ensures you get to this stage in as short a time as possible. After this You should keep building up mines to get more resources and research new tech according to how you want to play from then on. If you like attacking people, focus on getting espionage probes as soon as possible, so you can see planet defences. You can see what tech you need under the technology screen. You could now research laser tech for better defences, or you could focus on impulse drive for heavy fighter, colony ships, and cruisers (in that order). Regardless what you choose, you should research armour tech, weapons tech, and shielding tech: these help build your defences, and their benefits apply to other colonies too. You could also try to improve your combustion engine tech for faster small cargo so you raid faster and will have access to recyclers and large cargo ships at level 6. Bear in mind that you could also focus on getting impulse tech 5 instead giving your small cargo a massive speed boost (they become as fast as heavy fighters) but you'll be missing out sorely on recyclers (needs combustion 6). Researching impulse mostly costs huge amounts of crystal, while combustion takes more deuterium. General tips *The * in the galaxy screen means that there was some activity on that planet in the last 15 minutes. This can be because the owner is online, or because it was attacked/probed. *You can change the name of your Home Planet and your colonies by clicking on the name in the overview window(top left). You can abandon your colonies here too, which creates a "destroyed planet". Destroyed planets can be raided and probed (defence remains), and they are removed after 24 hours. When the same slot then gets colonized again the field count may differ. *Soon power plants will become very expensive and fusion isn't a great option at the start. Solar satellites can be very useful as a cheap source of energy but you will probably lose them all next time you are attacked. Only use these if you are sure you are defended well enough so that no-one will want to attack you in the first place, and even then regard them as temporary sources of energy. Do keep building up your solar plant as well. *You can colonize by making a colony ship go to an empty slot in a galaxy. Slot 1 will be very hot, so your solar satellites will be very effective. Slot 15 will be very cold, so your deuterium synth will run most efficiently (generating more per energy). Slots 4 through 6 have the highest average field count, meaning you can build a lot on them before they are full. (You'll eventually want colonies with at least 200 fields.) *Fusion plants can be useful as backup when your solar satellites get blown up so you can build new def/sats asap. Just shut it down when not needed. Also, the amount of energy generated per unit of deuterium increases not only with the energy tech level, but also with the level of the fusion plant. This means they become pretty useful with both high level fusion plant and high energy tech. *No matter what level your mines are, they all generate either 3 metal, 2 crystal, or 0.5~0.7 (depending on maximum temperature of your planet) deuterium per energy per hour. They just keep using up more energy each level. *Use a simulator like http://drago-sim.com or http://speedsim.net to learn about what works in combat and what doesn't. *A great tip for attacking another planet: No defense has Rapid Fire against anything, not even against probes. What this means is that you can send along any number of probes with an attack and your opponent will waste their fire on cheap probes while your real fighting ships stay around much longer. It'll cost you some probes to do this, but it's a great advantage against people with some heavier defense (esp. Gauss Cannons and up). It'll also help with keeping more cargo ships alive. To counter against this yourself keep a few fighting ships around as defense as well, but not so much it'll attract fleet crashers. Like in all things, this game is about balance. See Also *Gaining resources *Tips Category:Strategy